They would come on set and stuff, but during the initial prep process, it was just with Adam. I met all the guys in the movie that were portrayed at one point. Even though we’re just doing a movie about these guys in the 2-16 and this platoon, they will be representing the entire military and I know how my buddies carry themselves, so I was able to grab a little bit from them, but for the most part I had to make it specific to Adam.ĭid you meet with anyone else in the 2-16? It was a completely different experience. Were you able to talk to them too, use them sort of as a sounding board and gain insight in prepping for the role?Ī little bit, but my one buddy, he’s a Navy SEAL, but the difference between something like American Sniper and this, they’re almost fighting too different wars, you know, just the way those guys are trained up and how they go about missions and then the age that they’re at when they’re deployed as opposed to these infantry guys. You have friends who are in the military yourself. Was it easy? I don’t know but I would say by the time that Jason and I met him, he had given himself to David Finkel to write about him and he was very open with me. I think it’s understood that Adam needed to work through some stuff and he felt like all of this would be helpful for him regardless of how uncomfortable it was. He basically lived with Adam for nine months and was there for the toughest times in Adam’s life. Was it easy for him to open up? Part of the thing about this story is that a lot of these guys have trouble talking about this stuff or getting it out of their systems.Īdam kind of went through it even in a more invasive way when David Finkel wrote the book Thank You for Your Service. We went out in the woods in the middle of winter, and you know I felt like we were able to really connect. We were just able to settle into it, and yeah man, just kind of started with some food and a drink. I didn’t feel like there was any question I could ask that would be off limits. Just him knowing the fact that some guy from Hollywood was going to put his life on screen, I just felt kind of vulnerable in that scenario, but Adam is such a great guy. I flew up there with Jason, and I can still remember just being very nervous riding over there. I can still remember when the plane landed in North Dakota. Were you nervous about meeting him at first in any way? But that thought didn’t really last long and then I just felt a real responsibility in that I wanted to be the guy to help tell Adam’s story. That’s what we’re doing as actors and I felt like even like just acting like I had been through it would be kind of disrespectful. I just have so much respect for the military and you know with Adam’s story, to play a sergeant finishing up his third deployment and putting his life on screen, I was very nervous about doing it and almost didn’t want to pretend. I just figured there was a lot of experience that I would have to try and replicate. I knew that this was something that I couldn’t just show up in a week and do or show up in a month and do. Miles Teller: I was really intimidated by it. The movie, written and directed by Jason Hall (who wrote American Sniper) largely keeps politics out of the equation and simply allows us to see what our service members have to grapple with in a world that often has no idea what they’ve experienced. The movie focuses primarily on two returning veterans, Adam Schumann (Teller) and Tausolo Aieti (Samoan actor Beulah Koale), as they come home to Topeka and deal with all those problems and more, including Schumann’s inescapable guilt over the death of battalion sergeant James Doster (Brad Beyer), his relationship with his wife (Haley Bennett) and Aieti’s increasingly desperate attempts to live with an overwhelming head injury. The movie is partially based on the book of the same name by David Finkel, who spent months with members of the 2-16 Infantry Battalion both in Iraq and back home, chronicling their return to civilian life and the multitude of issues they confronted, including life-changing injuries, PTSD and a government that seemed to lose sight of these men once they left the field of battle. Miles Teller delivers the second of two outstanding performances this month (his first was in the excellent firefighter drama Only the Brave) in Thank You for Your Service, an understated yet nevertheless hard-hitting look at the struggles faced by soldiers returning to normal life after tours of duty in combat zones.
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